Let's play Bloodsword, book 3/5

[Jfdlsjfd]

I'll answer those questions later... (cue mysterious music).

We go left, inspired by an out-of-book rule or because we like following serpents.

Soon, we reach a circular, brick-lined chamber with a frieze on the well depicting a tall metallic figure wearing a three-pointed helmet. In one of the picture it is shown attacking diminutive human figures surrounding him, its mace scattering them like chaff. In another, he's smashing temples to rubble. In a third scene, he's bowing to a human priest holding his hand behind his back with his hands pressed together.

That's a pretty specific description. Let's not forget it. The giant creature is apparently... hand-phobic?

We keep following the tunnel, since the room has only one exit.

And guess who we meet, guarding an entrance to the underworld? This guy:

And yes, in the next section, we're asked if we want to do hand gesture or fight him, and then to choose the hand gesture we make.

Book, it was litterally 5 sections ago. We're not goldfish. We read the book...

And since we do well on this test, he powers down and offers us his crystal tuning rod. Which we pocket, of course.

[If we had chosen to fight, we'd miss that object and be in for a tough fight since it's a 8d6 damage monster. Though with a FP of 7, the group would stand a good chance to fight him with spells whie Trixie just goes into full defense in front of him. Anyway...]

We're then offered another left-right choice, and we obediently turn left.

The we reach another crossing the opportunity to turn right, which we pass.

This is quite an underground maze!

The we reach a room with many dessicated corpse on the ground, obviously hit by arrows coming out of arrow slits on the walls. We're given the opportunity to dash across the room (440) or the crawl under the arrow slits (418)

Since we know better than to do the obivous in this type of situations, we assume that the bowmen are long dead behind their arrow slits and we run across the room.

Bingo.

Mysterious black tentacles exits from the holes and try to catch us, but we're too quick for them....

We reach another room, in which a dog-headed man is standing guard in front of a wooden door barred by rusted iron bolts.

We can fight (286) or use an item (81). Since there is no reason not to try to use an item since we're usually offered a list, we go to 81 trying to remember if we got an opportunity to gather dog food, or a dog whistle or.... a tuning fork (305), a copper bottle (222) or a golden mirror (74).

 

[Joshua Randall]

Hmm. Perhaps if we show the dog-man himself in a mirror he will be horrified and withdraw?

Nothing seems to make sense here so that is my vote.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I'd say that the right choice was to use the tuning fork, because we got it by bypassing the fight in the room just before.

We'll explore both of them, and, indeed, @Joshua Randall was right.

Using the golden mirror stuns the guardian, who stares at it and put its paws to his face in horror... Losing the first turn of the fight.
Using the copper bottle is just silly, so the players lose a turn waiting for it to produce an effect, any kind of effect, in vain, while the cynocephalous dog-headed warrior positions himself to attack us...

The fight would be easy... but there is a special section if we Enthral the Dog-headed creature. Which might either be detrimental (as we've seen when fighting the Giantess) or beneficial (most commonly, like when we fought Auguste de Vantery).

Let's try that first and have everyone defend.
Round 1: Esmaralda casts Enthralment (3) but the Dog resists (4), everyone defends.
Round 2 : The Dog attacks Trixie and misses (13), Esmeralda memorizes Enthralment again.
Round 3 : The Dog attacks Trixie and... hits (7), for 14-3 = 11 damage. Ouch! He's however enthralled (7, and 10 on the resistance roll).

We command the creature to open the door, and it uses the tip of its spear to touch the locks in turn, magically unlocking them each time. The door now stands open and...

"Pausing only to slit the dog-headed creature's throat, you step through the open doorway."

Nice, aren't we? There was absolutely no reason to kill this creature. Sure, it was a guard, but it wasn't likely to call for help. And the way it's written make it seems our dashing ladies are casual killer, slitting throats here and poking eyes out there as a common passtime.

Not guessing correctly has dire consequences. The only options would be to try to pick the lock, which would either succeed (by rolling 2d6 against RANK for the Trickster, which means doing 2, 3 or 4 on 2d6, a 15% chance, or activate a trap that does... brace for it! 2d6 projectile on the trickster and 1d6 agains the other players, each doing... 5 damage, armour nonwithstanding. Or we could use the spear, if we had kept it after the fight, before knowing it's a tool used to open the door, or a set of fingerbones (we didn't find them, but I trust adventurers to keep fingerbones as long as they are Capitalized Items. Oh, and to keep a weapon, even if the inventory was running full, after the fight with the dog-headeed guard. If we didn't keep it, and the Trickster failed, we'd notice that it has disappeared, along with the corpse, into a thin mist, and that a mural frieze was depicting people worshiping the dog-headed creature guarding the way to the underworld. And we then reach a Your Quest Ends Here, as we wail upon the door uselessly while we can only imagine that Sussurien was getting close to the twin Swords of Life and Death.

Which I might had, we'd have reached if had just been courteous to him and accompanied him quietly.


We could also have used the tuning fork when arriving in the room, in which case the dog-headed creature would recognize the silent sound, do a military salutue and open the door.

Leading us to 483, the same section we're going by Enthralling the poor, no-longer-dog-headed, and actually no-longer-headed-at-all guard.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Now now, slitting someone’s throat doesn’t decapitate them, unless you do it wrong. Err. So I’ve heard.

I like that there are two possible Capitalized Nouns that work here.

I also think it’s funny when you reach these sections with Your Quest Ends Here after you traversed a path. Can’t you just… go back the way you came?

(Funnily enough, the ur-gamebook, Warlock of Firetop Mountain, DOES allow/require you to retrace your steps in the second half of the book — the Maze of Zagor. Although everyone hated that part so maybe that’s why other gamebooks are all a series of one-way doors.)

I wonder which path Sussurien took? If we’re fast enough can we catch him? Hahah, of course not.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I like that there are two possible Capitalized Nouns that work here.

Yes, especially when one is the Golden Mirror... Remember? The Abbot used it for divination, and we let him use it, and in the next section the book said that we can take it back, though since the holy man knows how to use it, and us not, it would be a petty move. Litterally.

I also think it’s funny when you reach these sections with Your Quest Ends Here after you traversed a path. Can’t you just… go back the way you came?

There is a chance that we found the One True Path through the maze. In a post-victory analysis I'll try to map the sewers but maybe they converge to this door?

Which means that the most obvious thing would be... to wait for Prince Sussurien to get out, holding both swords -- do you think he'd let the Sword of Life lying around instead of filling his inventory? -- and ambush him on the way out. It's pretty typical in fiction to have the bad guy take all the risks to explore a ruin only to have the protagonist waiting at the entrance with guns and stealing the treasure. Or did I get it reversed?

I wonder which path Sussurien took? If we’re fast enough can we catch him? Hahah, of course not.

Tadaa!

(of course, over the last three section, we tried to activate 3 times Salvia's healing power, with 3 HP each, and the rolls were 1, 5 and 6, resulting in Salvia investing 9 HP and recovering 0, 9 and 12 from the healing pool, allowing her full recovery and healing Trixie back to full.)

We enter a bowl-shaped cave with walls of quartz. Huge stalactites of Damocletian foreboding hangs from the ceiling. At the far end, a wooden trapdoor... and we're seeing Suusurrien battling with a wooden idol with "an unyielding snarl made all the more fierce by the totemic scars radiating from its eyes". I don't know exactly how that looks, but that sounds cool.

"It's the Seven-in-One!" shrieks Sussurien. Destroy it or our quest is doomed to fail!"

Not very impressive you say (except the damage rolls)?

Indeed.

However, we're given the option to use an item, namely the orb of fire (350) or the Magian wand (461).

Since we didn't acquire the latter in this universe, and the orb of fire (acquired last book) seems very useful against a wooden creature, we'll conveniently bypass the fight.

We utter the word Conflagration to activate the orb. A fire tendril leaps from it and curls around the monster, soon to be reduced to a pile of smoldering ashes (the orb is unfortunately destroyed).

Two commentaries here: first, I am not sure we ever learned about the activation word for this orb. We looted it from a chest, was there a post-it on it with the password written? Second, if you wonder why I used a powerful item on this seemingly weak monster, it's because... there are really 7 in 1. If you kill it, a smaller, meaner version of the wooden idol exits from the corpse and keeps fighting.

We're asked if we have the IMPROBITY codeword (another strange one), and we don't, so we head to the next section where we will, finally, have a climactic fight with Prince Sussurien...

...only to discover that his corpse is lying on the floor, killed by Hasan who just sighs and mention "it's dawn!" reminding of his promise to kill him before that time.

We can no reach the vault in which rests the blade of the Sword of Life! (40).

 

[Joshua Randall]

Hasan was with us the entire time? Or he teleported in just now to kill steal for the XP? Either way, bah! He deprived us of one last bon mot vs. Prince Sussurien

Also when fighting the 7-in-1, if you don’t have the Capitalized Noun, you really have to fight it 7 times? That’s awesome!

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Hasan was with us the entire time? Or he teleported in just now to kill steal for the XP?

He teleported. We lost track of him when he took the door to leave the Garden of Fatima just before us. There is a strong possibility he took the door directly to this room and waited, in hiding, for an opportunity to kill Prince Susurrien.

Either way, bah! He deprived us of one last bon mot vs. Prince Sussurien

Yep. I'll rant about it later!!

Also when fighting the 7-in-1, if you don’t have the Capitalized Noun, you really have to fight it 7 times? That’s awesome!

His last stats: FP 12 (!), PA 9, AR 0, HP 15, Damage: 3d6.

I think the wisest thing to do is to have one character defend while the other hacks at it. If you're fighting it alone, you're in trouble. At first I thought it was somewhat cheesy to use this tactic, but in retrospect, I now think it's OK. After all, being in a swordfight 2-to-1 is, in real life, not a good situation to be in.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

In the next section, we're awed by how cool Hasan, the leader of the Marijah sect of Assassins that plagued our friend (?) Tobias de Vantery's Templars, is. He avoids traps, display the strength of three men despite having a wiry frame... and so on. He also does some long explaining of the twin Swords of Life and Death...

So long I was afraid we would be killing or insulting us as we're won't to do.

Hasan takes the blade of Death he was seeking, casually adding that Sussurien would have betrayed us and he hopes we'll meet again... as allies.

Well... he just sliced Prince Sussurien's throat, stealing both the kill and the loot -- I was looking forward to poaching that gem the size of duck egg -- he wasn't going to say something like "He was really a nice guy, always ready to please!"

We bow slightly toward him to say the same, and when we get our heads up again, he's vanished away. Thankfully, he left the blade of the Sword of Life here, and

• The sword magically reforms as one item, which apparently includes the hilt, for inventory carrying capacity,
• We get 1,000 xp to be gained at the end of the book,
• We can now discard it freely without fearing to be victim of the curse of the True Magi.

I am tempted to discard it RIGHT NOW in order to pick a random item, like an iron ration, just to cause some discontinuity in the next two books, who will certainly assume we have the Sword.

As we reach the exit, we see a tall slender figure clad in exotically fashioned armour, waiting for us on the steps by the door.

Wait, are we being ambushed by a bad guy?

We recognize him instantly, it's our old foe... Icon.

Actually, the book adds a sentence to explain he's our deadliest foe back from before we started our quest, in the Battlepits of Krarth. Which is nice, because, honestly, I barely remembered him (if I hadn't already played this book several time, I'd saying "hum, I remember the barbarians, the gonzo strategy game player and the three witches, or Echidna, and the dead Magus who took 1,000 years to come up with... the exact same plan that failed last time, but not him.

It would have been more satisfying to have Prince Sussurien as a boss fight, TBH.

We tell him to brush off, that we don't want to kill him, and he starts ranting.

Here it is, and honestly, I'd have expected our heroines to kill him before he ended, but they are abiding by the code that forbids anyone to act while the BBEG is doing his Evil Speech of Time Freezing.

"By my honour, this is a call to battle! Do you mean I am to suggest I am unable to destroy you? Like the merest ant, I'll crush you! Like a thing without bone, you'll squirm and die under the heel of my boot! For five years I have pursued you, since the day of your callow youth when by stark chance you managed to get the better of me in Krarth. When I arrived in Crescentium [redacted] I discovered you were also in Outremer. Since then, I have remained on your spoor, prepared to hunt you for hate's sake to the very boundaries of the Earth if need be. The petty concern of yours for the magic blade is nothing! My feud with you is like thunder, my wrath is spitting with lightning!

He then proceeds to cast the Spell of Retributive Fire before proceeding to insult us again.

At this point, we decide to react by shouting a roar of anger and rushing toward him. This guy is really a frothing lunatic!

Note that he's also wearing a jewel on his turban. Maybe the illustrator mistook him for Susurrien as well.

He can't be enthralled. Whomever hits him also take 1 HP of damage from his flame armour.

Round 1:

Trixie moves 1 square right, so Icon can't attack right now, but at the same time Icon moves to the right to meet Winny. Next turn, he'll be adjacent to both of them, and the rules say he'll focus on the one with the lowest FP... which is Trixie, who is also, unfortunately, the hardest to hit...

Winny attacks, since Icon went into melee (8) for a 5 damage, and takes 1 one damage.
Salvia won't even bother to use an arrow, since the damage is paltry (1d6-2)... She could be wielding a gem doing 3d6 damage...
Esmeralda casts Nemesis Bolt (5) for a net 22 damage.
Trixie uses her extra action to attack (3) for 5 damage.

Round 2:

Trixie defends at the same time Icon attacks. 3d6+1 against a paltry FP 9 is hard. The roll of 12 means he misses.
Winny attacks (3) for 8 net damage. Icon is down to 15 HP.
Salvia starts praying for his soul, as the poor deranged warrior certainly doesn't deserve to go in Hell.
Esmeralda casts Sheet Lightning (more useful against a mob, but hey, she might not have the chance to cast Nemesis Bolt against him again...). The roll is 9, an easy pass, for 11 net damage.

Round 3:

Trixie keeps defending, Icon keeps missing (9). What, NINE? Well, that's a hit on poor Trixie. For 14 net damage. She's down to 21.
Winny attacks (3) for 6 net damage, killing Icon (and incurring a second HP of fire damage).

Reduced at 0 HP, Icon casts the Vaporization spell, and turns to mist. He claims to retire to restore his strength. We see that behind him, the fire wall he created earlier is dying down, but still emitting a considerable heat.

We are offered the opportunity to either run through it or use an item. Which we will, if only to allow Salvia to spend 4 HP to creatie a healing pool of (die roll 2-2 = 0 HP, boo). The only object we have here is the Jinni's copper bottle. Let's try it...

(This time, Salvia only gets back 3 HP in the pool healing herself after just spending 3 more HP...)


We see that in gaseous form, Icon is trying to reach the place where the Sword of Life used to be, in order to bath into the light, hoping it would heal him. We trick him into reaching up... into our copper bottle instead, and we put the stopper back in.

His voice rings from inside the bottle, where he calls us spawn of peasantry and other unpleasing names.
He also cast a spell summoning spirits of his clan from the Underworld and task them to take from us what is the most precious to us.

By which, of course, he means the Blood Sword.

The one I had discarded earlier? Please, feel free, ancestral spirits, to take my iron ration instead. I'll now proceed to conveniently happen to find a random sword lying on the cavern's floor...

Instead, we're glum and despondent. We move out of the cave, only to see a door popping out of nowhere, through which Hasan and Fatima look at us. Hasan tries to say that we were relieved from this burden and of our destiny, but Fatima says that we're heroes, and that striving is what we do. She suggests that since the spirits of the dead took the sword, the only way to take it back is to... enter the realm of dead and get back from it, which is fraught with peril but possible. Which we'll do in the next book, after two tasks: leveling up and reviewing some aspects of the book and unexplored paths...

 

[Joshua Randall]

I believe this meme is appropriate to Icon:

Also let me get this straight: we beat the guy, trap him in a bottle, and he still kiboshes our victory by sending our princess to another castle?

FIE! I say. FIE upon this gamebook’s bull-droppings.

Do we get to go to the land of the dead by slitting our own throat(s)? Because no kidding, that was one of the coolest quests in Neverwinter Nights (the early 2000s BioWare version, that is).

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I believe this meme is appropriate to Icon

This is one of the failings of this book. Despite being fun and evocative, and having lots of cool scenes, it has implemented the weidest way of distilling the lore to the reader: on a path that lead to death.

Since we didn't die on our way in, we barely remember Icon and he appears totally out of blue, like madman stalking us after we beat him in a fair contest FIVE YEARS AGO.

There were, however, lots of information to be had on him, that we could have accessed by getting to Your Quest Ends Here section that were easily avoidable by taking sensible choices that led to not meeting him, or hearing about him, in this whole book.

1. His name isn't Icon. It's Aiken, and he comes from the Far East, and he's incensed that people can't pronounce his name correctly and mistake it for the word Icon, and I guess that's why he lives in a perpetual state of unrest.
2. He has a sister, more versed in magic than fighting, called Saike. However, she shares his fate: nobody can be bothered to learn her name and everyone is calling her Psyche. Yes, that same one, Esmeralda's former colleague.
3. He felt humiliation 5 years ago and he's now looking to kill those who beat him. He arrived in Outremer recently, and informed his sister about us, saying we're mean, mean persons and that he'll visit her in his quest to clear his honor.
4. That's why she summoned a demon to remove us, not because she was just randomly mean.
5. Actually, if we had all accepted the suspicious looking potions from the sorceress that everyone warned us against including the common people in the street (if we talked to them instead of spitting at them in order to make them clear the road) (and talked the local language, LANGUAGE MATTERS!), then she'd look at our inconscious corpse and do a villainous exposition before slicing our throats and rejoicing to see soon her little brother coming to visit.
6. Aiken is incensed that we killed his sister (apparently he did visit her, after all) and he resolved to avenge her.
7. He's in league with the riffraff of the city to track us, so that might explain the lukewarm welcome one gets as a Trickster.

If we had known that, I guess his appearance at the end of the book would be less surprising. Except that you can only get all these informations on several runs, since they have the requirement : "be on a dying path". The practice started in book 1, actually: if you fall for his proposal to ally an accept his help in tending your wounds, and you're alone, he actually poisons you and tells you about his name (and pet peeve) so you can at least know who killed you.

There are some times where WE are total jerks (I was going to provide examples, but I'll correct my sentence: we're most of the time total jerks, from the slaves we whipped to Prince Sussurien), but man, this Aiken guy seems to have severe psychological problems as well. "You beat me at chutes & ladders 17 years ago, prepare to DIE!"

It's even worse than the whole Magian side-quest which you only discover if you renounce getting two wishes from the Genie and made the suboptimal choice of jeopardizing your own quest on top of that: in this case, it could be explained by good roleplaying. Doing something cool, and something that is Right and Just, doesn't necessarily involve getting better loot than being Evil and Selfish, it is its own reward, but at least you get to experience the content without dying...

Note: I wasn't surprised that a former academic colleague would summon a demon to kill us. Contrary to the stance taken in
Carr's epic, it is consistent with my experience of actual workplace relations in academia.

Also let me get this straight: we beat the guy, trap him in a bottle, and he still kiboshes our victory by sending our princess to another castle?

Yep. All these efforts to outsmart him for nothing. Strong is the railroad train!

Do we get to go to the land of the dead by slitting our own throat(s)? Because no kidding, that was one of the coolest quests in Neverwinter Nights (the early 2000s BioWare version, that is).

We'll spend a whole book (#4) trying to get dead. Your method is much more efficient, though, except that there is no resurrection spells in this world. If you die, you roll another character, unless you're a legendary hero (Orpheus) or happen to know a guy (Lazarus).